Arts Mallorca
Agenda
Joan Cortés · Ple al buit

| Art
Joan Cortés · Ple al buit

The search for the many forms of beauty has accompanied Joan Cortés throughout his tireless journey between art and life. In an age defined by visual excess, garish colours and impossible gestures, Cortés stands firm, looking elsewhere and moving in other directions. Working against the grain, he achieves a simple yet powerful aesthetic — a restrained beauty that is perhaps the hardest to attain. His work is the result of an exhausting and complex process, an endless labour of successes and failures that ultimately offers a shared benefit: sculptures and graphic works — almost sculptural in nature — that seek the essence of a beauty without time, space or place, or perhaps one that contains them all. A truly timeless beauty.

This exhibition, conceived as an installation for the new contemporary art space COR, presents two distinct lines of artistic research in Cortés’ work:

Two lines of investigation

On the one hand, his most recognisable approach: an exquisite organic abstraction expressed through sculptures and graphic works that refer to the body, to being, and to sexuality. Some pieces appear on the verge of levitating; others resemble the result of taxonomic dissection or careful microscopic observation. Rendered in a precise palette of wise white, incarnate pink and rigorous black, these works draw our attention to suggestive forms that carry the memory of the most sublime Brancusi and the most delicate Pevsner.

On the other hand, Cortés presents a more material, expressive and atavistic line of research. These works relate to the idea of refuge and shelter, to the earth’s topography, and to everything shaped or excavated by human hands. They also evoke human ingenuity and utopian thinking, African architectural traditions and Persian constructive enigmas — elements deeply connected to our history and to what defines us as human beings, and to our constant, insatiable search for the essential forms of beauty.